Research Notes

Turnbull Library Record, Volume XIII, Issue 1, 1 May 1980, Page 47

Research Notes

Associate Professor Antony Alpers of Queen’s University, Kingston, Ontario, is preparing a complete edition of the stories of Katherine Mansfield. With the assistance of a Leave Fellowship from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada he visited Turnbull in October 1979 to transcribe several manuscripts and to work on annotations and dating of the stories. Professor Alpers’s new biography, The Life of Katherine Mansfield, was published recently in New York and London.

The Trustees Committee for the Alexander Turnbull Library has agreed to allow Dr Cherry Hankin of the University of Canterbury to edit the letters of John Middleton Murry to Katherine Mansfield in the Turnbull collections for publication by Constable following the withdrawal of Vincent O’Sullivan from the project.

Lawrence Badash, Professor of History of Science at the University of California, Santa Barbara, visited the Turnbull Library in January 1980 for research on his biography of Lord Rutherford. The Library’s Sir Ernest Marsden collection (MS Papers 1342) is especially rich in Rutherford materials, as Marsden was a student of, and research assistant to, the famous physicist for several years around 1910, in Manchester. In addition, during his long career with the New Zealand D.5.1.R., Marsden gathered information about Rutherford’s youth and education in the Nelson area, at Havelock, and at Canterbury College. Dr Badash has already examined the extant Rutherford materials in England and Canada, but much of the information preserved in New Zealand is to be found nowhere else.

Dr Badash is the editor of Rutherford’s Correspondence Catalog (New York, American Institute of Physics, 1972) for which further supplements are being prepared, and the author of several books on the history of physics. Lauris Edmond is preparing an edition of the letters of Arthur Rex Dugard Fairburn (1904-1957), poet, essayist and critic, for publication late in 1980. Mrs Edmond has drawn on letters in private hands and the two major collections in the University of Auckland Library and the Alexander Turnbull Library.